“I Was Not Going To Rest Until I Brought India Home,” Catherine Oxenberg On The Cult That Held Her Daughter Hostage

Catherine Oxenberg shares every parent’s worst nightmare in Captive(Gallery Books; August 7, 2018; Hardcover), the heartbreaking and shocking exposé of the secretive organization that held the Dynasty star’s daughter hostage and the details of Catherine’s mission to save her. A powerful depiction of a mother’s love and determination, Captiveis a personal account of the lengths that a mother will go to save her child.

In 2011, Catherine joined her daughter, India, at a leadership seminar for a new organization called Nxivm. Her twenty-year-old daughter was on the verge of building her own company and they both thought the program might help her achieve her dream. But quickly, Catherine saw a sinister side to what appeared to be a self-help organization designed to help its clients become the best versions of themselves.

Catherine watched in horror as her daughter fell further and further down the rabbit hole, becoming brainwashed by the organization’s charismatic leader, Keith Raniere. Despite Catherine’s best efforts, India was drawn deeper into the cult, eventually joining a secret, elite “sorority” of women members who were ordered to maintain a restricted diet of five to eight hundred calories a day, recruit other women as “slaves,” and were branded with their leader’s initials.

Following Keith Raniere’s arrest in March 2018, fragments of Nxivm’s disturbing actions have come into the light. Featuring interviews with past Nxivm members and experts in the field of cults, Captive pulls back the curtain even further on this dangerous cult and how it lured in its members.

See Below For An Excerpt From The Prologue Of Captive

“It was a question no mother should ever have to ask her daughter. But I had no choice—her life was in danger. I needed to get to the truth, and fast.

India was on the tail end of a five-day visit home from New York. We were driving along the Pacific Coast Highway to a doctor’s appointment when I asked her point-blank:

‘India . . . have you been branded?’

Words I never thought I’d hear come out of my mouth. Not in a million years.

Sitting next to me in the passenger seat, my daughter looked gaunt and sleep deprived. Her golden blonde hair had been falling out in clumps, and, at twenty-five, she hadn’t had her period in a year—the reason she was seeing the doctor that day. Adding to that, my lighthearted, free-spirited daughter had grown distant and burdened in recent months, to the point where I barely recognized her. A few weeks earlier, to my horror, I had discovered why.”